Utilitarianism

UTILITARIANISM
• Is consequentialist in nature.

• CONSEQUENTIALISM – determines the morality of an act according to

its consequences or results, rather than the predisposition of the
agent or the intrinsic value of the act.

• The result or the consequence whereupon utilitarianism bases the

morality of an act is equivalent to its production of utility.
UTILITARIANISM
• Considers an act good if and only if it produces the highest possible
amount of utility.

• JEREMY BENTHAM (1748 – 1832) and JOHN STUART MILL (1806 –

1873) are two scholars related to utilitarianism.
Premise of Utilitarianism
• Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign
masters, pain and pleasure.
• It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to
determine what shall we do. On the one hand the standard of right
and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened
to their throne.
• The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for
the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric
of felicity by the hands of reason and of law.
• The foundational premise of the principle of utility is the subjection of
all actions to pain and pleasure.
• The guideline that determines the morality or goodness of actions is
our natural inclination.
• “Nature has placed mankind” so as to pursue actions that produce
pleasure and to avoid those that inflict pain.
• Utilitarianism prescribes that the moral and ethical course to take is
to choose and follow the act that produces the highest amount of
utility.
The meaning of “NATURE”
• In the utilitarian view, “nature” refers to the basic experience of pain
and pleasure in the natural physical world.

• However, in natural law, “nature” is committed to the metaphysics of

essences. It is considered the predetermined essence in things.
• In determining the pleasurable and painful consequences of an
action, the experiences of both the agent and the community
affected by the action are taken into account.
• In fact, the agent’s experience is only one factor in considering those
affected by the consequences of an action.
Bentham says;
• By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to
produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, to prevent
the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party
whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in
general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular
individual, then the happiness of that individual.
CASE EXAMPE
• Supposing after a long day’s work, you are quite tired and hungry. You
have not eaten anything the entire day. Also, you still have a report to
do, which is not urgent. When you arrive home, you are either to eat
and get some rest, or to skip dinner and start writing the report.
Which one should you choose to do?

• Suppose the report that you needed to write would determine your
retention in the current downsizing at the company. As the
breadwinner of a family of four, you are very much aware that the job
was crucial.
• Though it would be long, technical, and detailed work that required
ample time to finish, it would be due in four days. Your choices were
(1) to take your meal and rest, then defer writing the report for the
next day; or (2) to write a part of the report for a few hours before
eating and resting to make sure that you would be able to finish it in
three days, just in time for the deadline. Which moral course should
you take?

• Between the two choices, both of which have pleasurable and painful
results, which is the moral one? How does utilitarianism justify it?
Hedonistic Calculus
• A means that allows for the quantification of pleasure and pain,
equivalent to the utility produced by such an action.
• The action that produces the highest amount of pleasure over pain
should be considered ethical.
• Utilitarianism employs the hedonistic calculus, or sometimes the
felicific calculus, as the means and criteria to calculate the amount of
pain and pleasure.
Hedonistic Calculus by Jeremy Bentham
(7 Conditions)
1. Intensity – This refers to the strength of pain and/or pleasure produced by the act.
2. Duration – This refers to the length of time of pain and/or pleasure produced by the
act.
3. Certainty or uncertainty – This refers to the possibility of attaining pain and/or
pleasure produced by the act.
4. Propinquity or remoteness – This refers to how soon pain and/or pleasure is produced
by the act.
5. Fecundity – This refers to the act’s successive production of similar experience (i.e,
pain is followed by pain, and pleasure followed by pleasure).
6. Purity – This refers to the disruption of a successive experience produced by the ac.
(i.e, pain is followed by pleasure, and pleasure is followed by pain.
7. Extent – This refers to the quantity of persons affected by pain and/or pleasure
produced by the act.
• The moral act between the two constrained choices given in the case
is to establish the intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, and
propinquity or remoteness of pleasure produced on one side, and the
pain produced by the same value on the other side…

• The moral act is to do the action that produces more pleasure over
pain, that is, utility. In the view of utilitarianism, the act is moral or
ethical if and only if it produces the highest amount of utility.
John Stuart Mill
• Made a distinction between qualities of pleasures
• Going beyond Bentham, he argues that pleasures must be
characterized into two kinds.
• The ones derived from the higher faculties are gained from the
rational capacity that is peculiar only to human beings.
• On the other hand, those derived from the lower faculties are from
sensuous experience and thus shared by animals.
John Stuart Mill
• Mill explains that possessing higher faculties, which entails possession
of the lower faculties, requires a higher kind of pleasure, not in terms
of degree and quantity but rather of quality;

“A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is

capable probably of more acute suffering, and is certainly accessible to
it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these
liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a
lower grade of existence.”
John Stuart Mill
• Even if an animal is well-fed and derives pleasure from merely eating
and sleeping, this kind of existence could not compare with the
pleasure and happiness of a human being who, although unable to
eat well, experiences the pleasures of the arts. He famously writes;

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better

to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the
pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side
of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.”
In sum, utilitarianism is, in the words of Mill,
the greatest happiness principle.
“The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the
Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion
as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the
reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the
absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure.”
On the Nature of Ethics and Its
Value to the Society and the
Person
Module II
What is Ethics?
• Ethics, or morality, is a branch of philosophy that broadly deals with
fundamental questions concerning the good.
• The terms ethics and morality, and moral and ethical are used
interchangeably.
• As a branch of philosophy, ethics is committed to these questions
through a process of rational argumentation.
Sub-Branches
• metaethics,
• normative ethics,
• applied ethics,
• and descriptive ethics

• With the exception of the last, the order of the three sub-branches
respectively ranges from the most abstract to the most concrete.
Normative ethics
• Normative ethics is the sub-branch of ethics that provides answers to
the general question of what makes an action right or good.
• This is the branch in ethics that is commonly employed in everyday
affairs since it has the task of evaluating and articulating the rightness
or wrongness of an action in order to prescribe what ought to be
done by a moral agent.
• The basis for the evaluation and articulation of prescribing what
ought to be done are the different normative theories in ethics which
will be discussed in the latter part of this course.
• Some major theories in normative ethics are deontological ethics,
utilitarian ethics, natural law ethics, and virtue ethics.
Normative ethics
• the reason for the claim of normative ethics’ commonness in
employment is its accessibility to everyday experience.
• It threads between the speculatively abstract interests of metaethics
and the contextually narrow concerns of applied ethics.
• Also, engagements to questions of both metaethics and applied
ethics occur when inquiries of normative ethics are raised.
Applied Ethics
• the application of principles of normative ethics to specific contexts is
that sub-branch of ethics called applied ethics.
• applied ethics is an appropriation of the principles of normative ethics
to specific contexts.
Metaethics
• metaethics take a “step back” by asking:
• what is the meaning of morality?
• what is the meaning of a good act?
• what is the basis for our standards of good and bad?

• Defined as “the attempt to understand the metaphysical,

epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and
commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.
• This is why metaethics, among the other sub-branches, lay claim to
being the most abstract and general in its inquiries.
Descriptive ethics
• Unlike normative and applied ethics, descriptive ethics, by its name,
has the function of describing facts about ethical systems instead of
prescribing norms.
• That is, descriptive ethics is that branch of ethics that observes,
records, articulates, and discusses the facts about ethical systems in
societies.
• Descriptive ethics is employed by the social sciences, particularly,
sociology, anthropology, and social psychology, to determine a certain
group or a given society’s moral values.
What is Ethics' value to society?
• Is ethics really relative to culture as Benedict claims?
• If ethics is relative to culture, what are its implications to, for
instance, the global society of the present?
• Does this mean that prescriptive determinations of good and bad
actions are not within our rational capacities to discover and
formulate?
• Does this not, in the final analysis, put to question objectivity not
only in ethical reasonings but as a whole?
• If we are all a product of our culture, does this mean that we are not
free agents?
philosophical thinking
philosophical thinking
• gaining wisdom,
• knowledge based on reason,
• experience,
• and engaging in rational discussion
philosophical thinking

• Martin Heidegger, for instance, considers thinking as

“memory, thinking that recalls, thanks.

• Put differently, it is a mental activity that pays homage to a

source that makes thought possible.

• a mental activity as in the case of imagining, dreaming,

analysing, solving puzzles, willing, etc.
philosophical thinking

•In addition, “philosophical” can mean

engaging in abstruse or deep thought, that
is, sounding difficult to understand, as when
a person remarks on another’s thinking as
“You sound so philosophical.”
Views of different philosophers on
Philosophical thinking
• philosophy is a combination of Greek root words “philia” (love) and
“sophia” (wisdom).

• love entails a strong affection, if not devotion, for its object—wisdom

in this case. Wisdom, on the other hand, signifies profound science,
learning or knowledge.
Views of different philosophers on
Philosophical thinking
• Pythagoras, preoccupied by the question concerning the primary
principle of things, the basic stuff that constitutes things.

• Pythagoras and his followers held that the “infinity and unity itself
were the substance of the things of which they are predicated. This is
why the number was the substance of all things”
Views of different philosophers on
Philosophical thinking
• they did not settle for knowledge of the appearance of but the
explanation behind things.
• They were absorbed in the fundamental question of the appearance
of things.
• Perhaps, they too wrestled the basic question that still resonates to
this day: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

• the character of that thinking which they qualified as philosophical.

Views of different philosophers on
Philosophical thinking
• The philosophical thinking, it can be drawn from above, involves
seeking for that knowledge that would explain the existence of the
material phenomena.
Views of different philosophers on
Philosophical thinking
• For Aristotle, “wisdom is knowledge of certain principles and causes”
The causes Aristotle was referring to are the material, formal,
efficient, and final causes.
• the material cause is the substance from which a thing exists;
• the formal cause is the essence or the substantial characteristics that
differentiate a thing from another which may possess similar
substance;
• efficient cause is the one that effects change in a thing;
• final cause is the purpose or the end of change. In this respect,
knowledge of these four causes, for Aristotle, would be wisdom.
Aristotle
•philosophical thinking requires the
pursuit of the ultimate causes of things;
philosophical activities can be
circumscribed in the search for the
causes of reality.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

• acceptable knowledge or understanding

must be grasped with certainty by the
thinking subject; reason as cogito
recognizes only knowledge with clarity
and distinctness without any moment
for doubt.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

• knowledge is gained when it is determined as clear

and distinct without an occasion for doubt by the
inquiring mind.
• Reason then is the measure by which wisdom is
gained.
• In this view, Descartes added a new requirement to
philosophical thinking, that is, it is rational and
submits to the rules of reason.
David Hume (1711-1776)
• question the presumptions concerning causes and reason.
• On the one hand, cause from the tradition of Aristotle up to Hume’s
time seemed to be beyond question and that the human mind by
default accepts causation as a fact.
• On the other hand, reason was thought as an overarching principle
for knowledge of things.
• In Hume’s view, experience, “lively perception,” is an inevitable source
of the contents of the mind and cause is not even before
experience—the notion of causation is drawn from experience.
David Hume (1711-1776)
•In Hume’s analysis, philosophy involves a mental
activity that values the sensible world as a
source of knowledge or wisdom;
•philosophical thinking entails not only
discovering the principles or causation and
subjecting forms of analysis to reason, but also
valuing and examining experiences, and even
causation and reason.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
• “Sapere aude!” = "Dare to know";
• thinking must be free and has the “vocation” to aid others in
achieving the ability to use their own reason; philosophical
thinking engages the public to use reason, to be free, and
have the resolve to think and speak for themselves.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
•philosophical thinking has the critical part in
guiding public discourses by expressing,
without fear, its prudent and well-thought
ideas.
•By doing so, it also inspires others to
recognise their ability to think
independently for themselves.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
• philosophical thinking pursues knowledge but ventures
into exploring other ways of thinking differently.
• Here, philosophical thinking is critical thinking, which
involves what Foucault calls as the “refusal to be
governed,” that is,
• it is not obsessed with assimilating knowledge, rather it
ventures into other ways of thinking.
• to “explore how it might be possible to think differently”
•philosophising has been going on since
human beings wondered about their
existence and their place in the grand
scheme of things. Thus, it must be borne in
mind that the discussion herein only serve
to shed light on philosophical thinking and
other philosophies need not be excluded.
On philosophizing…
•philosophers offer arguments, present their
explanations, and most importantly, offer their
proofs or supports for their views. The thought
that they have arrived at is not handed down as
if they must be taken on authority. They present
arguments that can be accepted, rejected, or
even critiqued based on the soundness and
validity of the arguments presented.
On philosophizing…
• philosophical thinking entails argument
construction. By argument, we refer to the group of
statements one of which, the conclusion or claim, is
deemed to follow from other statements (premises
or proofs).

• philosophical thinking requires that a thinker or

philosopher presents her views which must be
examined based on the soundness of these views.
THE DIFFERENCE
BETWEEN ETHICS AND
MORALITY
R.C. SPROUL
HTTPS://WWW.LIGONIER.ORG/LEARN/ARTICLES/DIFFERENCE-BETWEEN-ETHICS-AND-MORALITY
• The English word “ethic” or “ethics” comes from the Greek word ethos.
• The word “morals” or “morality” comes from the word mores.

• The difference is that the ethos of a society or culture deals with its foundational
philosophy, its concept of values, and its system of understanding how the world fits
together. There is a philosophical value system that is the etho of every culture in the
world. On the other hand, mores has to do with the customs, habits, and normal forms of
behavior that are found within a given culture.
• In the first instance, ethics is called a normative science; it’s the study of norms or
standards by which things are measured or evaluated. Morality, on the other hand, is what
we would call a descriptive science. A descriptive science is a method to describe the way
things operate or behave. Ethics are concerned with the imperative and morality is
concerned with the indicative. What do we mean by that? It means that ethics is
concerned with “ought-ness,“ and morality is concerned with “is-ness.”
• Ethics, or ethos, is normative and imperative. It deals with what someone ought to do.
Morality describes what someone is actually doing. That’s a significant difference,
particularly as we understand it in light of our Christian faith, and also in light of the fact
that the two concepts are confused, merged, and blended in our contemporary
understanding.
• What has come out of the confusion of ethics and morality is the emergence of what I
call “statistical morality.” This is where the normal or regular becomes the normative.
Here’s how it works: to find out what is normal, we do a statistical survey, we take a poll,
or we find out what people are actually doing.
• For example, suppose we find out that a majority of teenagers are using marijuana. We
then come to the conclusion that at this point in history, it is normal for an adolescent in
the American culture to indulge in the use of marijuana. If it is normal, we deem it to be
good and right.
• Ultimately, the science of ethics is concerned with what is right, and morality is
concerned with what is accepted. In most societies, when something is accepted, it is
judged to be right. But oftentimes, this provokes a crisis for the Christian. When the
normal becomes the normative, when what is determines what ought to be, we may as
Christians find ourselves swimming hard against the cultural current.
• The Christian concept of ethics is on a collision course with much of what is being
expressed as morality. This is because we do not determine right or wrong based on
what everybody else is doing.
• For example, if we study the statistics, we will see that all men at one time or another lie.
That doesn’t mean that all men lie all the time, but that all men have indulged in lying at
some time or another. If we look at that statistically, we would say that one hundred
percent of people indulge in dishonesty, and since it’s one hundred percent universal, we
should come to the conclusion that it’s perfectly normal for human beings to tell lies. Not
only normal, but perfectly human. If we want to be fully human, we should encourage
ourselves in the direction of lying.
• Of course, that’s what we call a reductio ad absurdum argument, where we take
something to its logical conclusion and show the folly of it. But that’s not what usually
occurs in our culture. Such obvious problems in developing a statistical morality are often
overlooked. The Bible says that we lean toward lying, and yet we are called to a higher
standard. As Christians, the character of God supplies our ultimate ethos or ethic, the
ultimate framework by which we discern what is right, good, and pleasing to Him.